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Meet the speakers: Christian Lindholm, User Experience Expert

As part of our ongoing series of ‘Meet the speakers’ articles, we’re delighted to introduce you to another pioneer taking part at the MEX conference in London on 2nd – 3rd May 2007.

Bio

Christian is a visionary product creator in the mobile and convergence domains. Most recently with Yahoo as Vice President of Global Mobile Products where he oversaw the development of its mobile services. Prior to that Christian spent 10 years with Nokia. At Nokia he was instrumental in driving the company’s user experience efforts. He is the father of the Nokia Series 60 user interface, the inventor of the Navi key user interface which between 1997 and 2005 was featured on more than 400 million phones globally. Before leaving the company in 2005 he and his team created the Nokia Lifeblog, a multimedia diary of the users life automatically created on the phone and archived on the PC. The users can share desired moments on a blog from either the phone or the PC, this solution is now standard on all Nokia Nseries devices. This was one of the first true convergence products in mobile space.

Simplicity is a common theme and philosophy that is driving him. There is always room for simplification.

Christian wrote with his colleagues the book Mobile Usability, How Nokia Changed the face of the Mobile Phone, he is a frequent speaker on the future of mobility. Helsinging Sanomat, Finland’s largest daily news paper called him the godfather of all Nokia mobile phone users. Christian holds several patents in user experience and mobile HW. Christian has a broadly read blog called Moving Experiences, where he shares the big picture, the details and things in between. It can be found at www.christianlindholm.com

Currently Christian is taking some time of observing the world as a mobile consumer. His interest lies in mobilizing the Internet, enabling what he calls moving computing. He spends most of his time in London, where he is living with his family.”

Speaker’s statement

Multimodality is a vehicle against complexity as mono-tasking, voice-centric devices evolve to multi-tasking, connected devices. There is a new breed of handsets hitting store shelves with integrated GPS, 3D and light sensors. All of them have microphones and most of them have camera sensors – we are entering sensory feast!

At the same time more and more sophisticated communication takes place on-line. The internet has been transformed with social networking sites, blogs, IM, feeds and e-mail combining for a multimedia communication feast. Finally, in the middle of it all the mobile industry faces the confusion of evolving into a service provider or becoming bit pipes.

How can interfaces be liberated, unified and uses to reduce complexity for users? In my presentation I will highlight some of the barriers that need to be overcome before the manifesto statement can become reality.

Why are they participating at MEX?

MEX is evolving into a leading gathering of mobile and convergence experience where the format drives change and attracts the ‘do-ers’ out of their labs.

Author

Marek Pawlowski is the founder of MEX. Since 1995, he has focused the MEX business on helping digital industries to develop better, more profitable products through improved understanding of user behaviour with mobile devices and wireless networks. MEX is best known for its events, research and consulting, which balance commercial, technical and user insights to define the future of mobile user experience.